“Huhhyeah?”
“Open up, shithead.”
“Huhhwhat is it?”
“Stop beating off in there.”
“Fuuuck yoooooou.” Dan Russell leaps up and, with pants around his ankles, shuffles across the shag carpet to make sure the door is locked. He gets a shock when he touches the knob.
“Trying to stick it in the keyhole?”
“Fuck you.”
“It’d fit in there too, I bet.”
“Up yours.”
“Yeah bet you’d like it you homo.”
“Fuck you! What the hell you want anyway?”
“Open up and I’ll tell you. Someone’s here to see you.”
“Someone? Who?”
“Open up. A lady.”
“A lady? Who?”
“Open up. She’s got big knockers.”
Dan stuffs his penis back into his pants and slowly zips up. He gives himself a couple of flicks with his index finger to make his hard go down and then opens the door. His brother is leaning against the door frame. He crosses his eyes at the sight of Dan, then blocks his path.
“Where is she?” Dan says, by which he means get out of the way.
“Maybe she left already, dickbreath.”
“Fuck you. Where’s she?”
“She’s up front. She goes, I saw a sign, stud for hire. Hope he’s not shooting it all into an old sock with red stripes that his mom goes in front of everybody, how ever did you get this soooo dirty, Dan?”
Dan pushes his brother out of the way. “Shut up.”
“She goes, I’m here for some of that hot Dan Russell action.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me.” Dan muscles past and begins down the hall.
“Keep believing it, shitforbrains,” says his brother.
He’s a good-looking boy, well built, with hair he constantly is pushing out of his eyes. His mother had stood there holding a semen-encrusted sweat sock, a look of genuine concern on her face, as if his foot were discharging some sort of toxic secretion.
At the end of the hall, Dan sees her silhouetted in the doorway She does have big knockers, and roundish hips, and long, straight legs that he imagines wrapped around his back, and a kind of pretty OK face. He pushes the hair out of his eyes.
“Hi,” he says. “You wanted to see me?”
“Well, I think you’re the person I want to see.” She smiles. “Are you the man with the van for sale?”
Something about the way she calls him a man just makes his day.
“Yes,” he says, deliberately deepening his voice. “Are you interested?”
“I’m very interested!” The woman smiles.
“Well, I’d be happy to show it to you.” He crosses his arms, turning the palms of his hands so that his biceps swell. “I’m Dan, by the way.” He smiles. They stand for a moment.
“Well, I’d love to see it.”
Dan makes this kind of what-a-doofus-I-am facial expression and reaches over to grab the keys off a hook. They walk out together, and he has trouble coming up with anything else to say. He’s relieved the van is there to talk about.
“It’s not like there’s anything wrong with it or anything. I just need something more in the line of an economy car what with gas costing what it does these days.” He shrugs.
“I know, isn’t it awful?” the woman agrees. “If I didn’t have all this stuff and people and things I need to carry around.”
“Well,” says Dan. “It’s a very comfortable van,” and he begins doing a walkaround to point out the features and open the sliding panel door and, not incidentally, show her the back, carpeted in thick shag.
But she says: “I’m sorry, I’m in a bit of a hurry. I’d like to just test-drive it. I’m sure all the, you know, is just fine.”
Faintly disappointed, Dan hands her the keys, taking advantage of the opportunity to cast a glance at her tits. He climbs into the passenger seat. The woman gets in, settles herself behind the wheel, and looks around.
“What a nice, comfortable van,” she says.
“You must take great care of it,” she says.
“Roomy,” she says.
“Starts right up,” she says, putting the key in the ignition and turning it.
“I, uh, had it tuned,” Dan says. She turns to him and smiles, throwing the van into gear. It’s a funny smile, tight; it makes her eyes crinkle up. Her right eye is noticeably bigger than her left eye. She has regular features, drearily pretty. A weak chin. He imagines her naked on the carpet in the back.
“It’s real reliable,” Dan says. “I mean, sometimes I think I must be crazy for getting rid of it. It’s real handy. I mean, I use it for the team, to take equipment, stuff like that.”
“Team,” says the woman, considering the word. She looks at him again. “I should have known you were an athlete. You have the build.”
Dan blushes. “Baseball,” he says. “I pitch.” He considers the possibility that now might not be a bad time to point out the luxuriously carpeted back. The van is turning right, and he leans toward her involuntarily and smiles at her, and sensing his smile, she smiles back, without looking away from the road.
She says, “I was wondering.”
She says, “I have some friends who brought me here, and I was wondering.”
She says, “Would it be OK if they came along on the drive? They’re right over there.”
Dan looks and sees two people, a man and a girl, standing in the road. They wave. “Sure,” he says. “It’s OK with me.” He feels slightly stung by the request. But the girl in the road is sort of cute he guesses. The van pulls to a stop and he turns to unlock the sliding panel door behind him. But then his own door is opening and he’s a little confused and he looks around to see the man standing just outside, staring up at him. “Get in the back,” the man says. He gestures with the machine gun he’s carrying.
The machine gun he’s carrying.
Dan moves into the back, not quite sure what to do with his hands. At any rate, he can’t shift from the passenger seat to the floor in the rear with his hands above his head, so he takes his chances, moving to the back the way he normally would and then quickly sitting cross-legged, resting his hands on his knees. Hope that’s OK. It must be, because the girl and the man get in and then the man just closes the panel door and doesn’t kill him or anything.
“We’re the SLA, and we need your vehicle,” says the man.
Dan wants to ask what the SLA is but figures it’d be better if he didn’t.
“You don’t do anything stupid, you don’t get hurt,” explains the man.
“That’s fine with me,” says Dan. “Just as long as I don’t get shot.”
The man and the girl laugh, and the man, who’s squatting on the wheel cover, reaches out and pats his shoulder. The lurching of the van nearly sends him sprawling.
“Watch it, Yolanda,” he says to the woman. There is a faint, derisive sound from the front seat. The man ignores this and turns to Dan, gesturing toward the girl beside him. “You know who this is?”
Dan shakes his head.
“Tania. Tania Galton.”
Dan nods now and as he does he feels himself sighing involuntarily, like, huuuhhhhh. His recognition of at least one of the many things that all of a sudden seem to be happening to him yield this hugely physical expression of release, as he feels himself freed from at least some of his confusion. He fairly rocks as he nods, and the sighing comes from deep inside. The man and Tania are smiling and laughing, and at the sight of this Dan can’t help smiling and laughing too. In fact, he’s basically crying over his luck in encountering smiling faces here and now.
“Wow,” he says. “Wow.”
“You know what?” says the man. “We need to stop and get a fucking hacksaw.” He holds up his wrist to display the dangling handcuff. And they all laugh some more.
PROPHET JONES
When he drove up he saw the two gals lying out on the grass he won’t bother to call a lawn bec
ause he may be a cheat but he’s no liar. It was the hard-looking one, Zoe or some such, and the fat old lady–looking one. The radio basically giving out a grave invitation to escape and they are not getting gone, they are sunbathing. He got out of his car and took their arms—some protest here, which he smirkled at a bit—and brought them to the door.
“What you doing on that lawn? I told you white folks got to stay out of sight around here.”
“It’s cool,” said DeFreeze.
“It’s cool. You listening to the news?”
“I say it’s cool, it’s cool,” said DeFreeze. “We reconnoited the perimeter.”
Prophet Jones stared at the man for a moment, his head moving with the slightest trace of a poor-fool shake.
“Where’s the radio at?”
“Ain’t no radio,” said DeFreeze.
“Come on here,” said Prophet Jones, and he waited while DeFreeze got himself a T-shirt, and then the two of them walked to ProphetJones’s car, parked at the curb. Which was good because the smell coming from the house was like pussy and okra and old piss and was upsetting to the stomach. DeFreeze climbed in the passenger side. Prophet Jones walked around the car slowly, looking at the yard, the jalopies crowding the driveway, back at the house and the cell of white faces clustered in the open door. He waved slightly, a dismissive gesture, and the cell withdrew inside and the door closed. After a moment’s hesitation he smoothly folded his large body and inserted it in the space of the open door, which he shut behind him.
Inside he gave the ignition key a half turn, and the radio came to life. Top of the hour, drive time, the news on every station the same: SLA in L.A., committing the daring daylight robbery of an Inglewood sporting goods store. Witnesses reported being fired upon by a young Caucasian woman, whose identity authorities were working to establish. The suspect vehicle, a VW van, had been recovered nearby. Prophet Jones folded his arms across the steering wheel and laid his face on them, peeping over to see how Field Marshal Cinque Mtume, the dumb motherfucker, reacted. His eyes widened, his lips ovaled, a comic wooooo-eee face. But there was nothing funny going on.
“The fuck they doing a holdup for?”
“Say your boy stole some socks.” Prophet Jones felt a deep pleasure resonating within as he emphasized the word socks. His dislike of the Field Marshal was intense at that moment. The word on Donald DeFreeze was that he was a common police informer, a weak man, a cuckold, a chump.
“Say what? Socks?”
“What they say.” Prophet Jones shrugged.
“Damn. We got to get out of here.”
“I advise it.”
“Not what I wanted to do.”
“Don’t matter what you wanted, Jim.”
“Damn. This plays havoc with our strategy.”
And who the fuck this fucking mutt think he fucking is, Bernard fucking Montgomery? Prophet Jones raised his head to look square at the Field Marshal. Why’d he bother coming here, is the major question. Because he didn’t want the house shot up: it’s not much, but it’s what he got. DeFreeze was processing the data, drumming nervously on his knees with his open palms, looking straight ahead through the windshield. As the warm evening drew near, the neighborhood settled into its torpid routine. Boys appeared on the streets, in growing numbers, in pairs and trios and half dozens, drawn like a magnet to the corners on the broad intersection at Vermont.
“You better go, Sin-Q Em-toom-ay.” Prophet Jones stretched the name beyond ridiculous. “Better go rally your troops.”
“Where I’m gonna go?”
“I don’t know. Go back to Frisco. Go back to your wife. She still around here, ain’t she?”
When DeFreeze turned to him, Prophet Jones could see that the man had been overwhelmed as if by a sudden shadow that covered the continuous succession of postures that substituted for his personality. He modeled a curious little boy expression on his face.
“How you know my wife?” he asked.
“I just hear about her.”
“What you hear?” DeFreeze twisted in the car seat, the vinyl squeaking.
“This and that.” Prophet Jones was leery of this particular avenue. DeFreeze balled his fists up and slammed them into his thighs. “Damn,” he said. “The little stories just keep coming on me. I hear and I close up my ears and they just keep coming.”
Motherfucker was freaking out on him. “Damn, nigger, you got no time for this. Got to get out of here right now.”
And what Prophet Jones definitely did not want to be was sitting inside his personal vehicle with Donald DeFreeze when the Man rolled up with his gotcha grin.
DeFreeze went right ahead. “Try to turn my back to it, put faith in her, but even now the little stories make their way here.”
“It’s bad. I know it. We all know the story. You not alone. They all the same. But you got to get going. Go get your shit together and find someplace else to be.”
He thought of the lockup downtown and how little it would take for the Man to offer him deluxe accommodations therein. Plus all the Man had to do was break a fucking window and that house was a what you call shambles.
“They ain’t all the same,” insisted DeFreeze, suddenly argumentative.
“What? Who?”
“I want you to know I got some really beautiful, aware comrades right in here. They are helping me put all this motherfucking shit behind me.” DeFreeze’s voice rose in pitch and volume and he tilted his head back. “I am truly blessed. My God has said unto me that I sinned and I must pay. But in his forgiveness my evil has perished and I am come unto the meek to offer them deliverance.”
What the fuck. Prophet Jones was not bargaining for anyone to be shoving a cross up his ass. Just took him on in here so he could hear the radio, and all the sudden he’s Reverend Ike. He reached past DeFreeze and unlatched the door, giving it a little push. Like, hint hint. The Field Marshal put one foot on the sidewalk but kept the rest of his body in the car. Prophet Jones exhaled sharply, opened his own door, and came around to the passenger side, where he fully opened DeFreeze’s door and gestured up at the house.
“Listen, DeFreeze. Go in there, get everbody together, put they guns, they C-rats, all they shit in they ditty bag, get going. They find you, you won’t be delivering a motherfucking pizza, you hear? Get out. Get on out.”
Hacksaw 1
McLellan’s Home Decorating Center extends deep into its low building, long narrow dark aisles formed from ceiling-high shelves leading like tunnels to the back of the store, where the overhead fluorescents are shut off and the parched dust of provident thrift has settled on every anciently untouched surface. The store smells of old cardboard and potting soil and it has the empty silence of a place that has only just stopped making noise. Toward the front, the remaining fluorescents flicker, and there’s also a large blue-lit device that first lures and then eliminates flying insects, sizzling them disconcertingly. Hoes and mops and nets and pickaxes and push brooms and rakes and scythes and shovels and window poles and window screens lean against the walls, and there are bins holding nails and screws and bolts and nuts, and stacks of paint cans, and canvas dropcloths folded heavily on low shelves, and terra-cotta flower pots and planters and window boxes of all sizes stacked on the floor, and the walls lined with perforated Masonite panels for paintbrushes and rolls of tape and sanding blocks and tape measures and work gloves to hang from, and the man at the counter is obscured behind the revolving display of shiny key blanks. Yolanda approaches the man, who is entering figures in a little notebook.
“May I buy a hacksaw, please?”
The man looks at her. He raises his nose and shakes his head slightly to signify incomprehension.
“A hacksaw. Hacksaw.” Yolanda mimes the act of sawing. She almost mimes the act of sawing off a handcuff but catches herself.
The man turns to look at the tools hanging behind him. He takes down a small crosscut saw.
“Yes, but … no. A saw, but different.”
He repla
ces the crosscut saw and removes a circular saw blade from a hook.
“Hacksaw. Hacksaw?”
“We closed.”
“But—”
“Closed.” He reaches behind him to snap off another row of fluorescents.
Dan Russell wants to know: “When you start these house-to-house things, what do you do? Just burst in with guns and all?”
“No, we’ll knock on the doors and announce ourselves and explain that we need the People’s help, so can we please billet some of our troops here or at least spend the night?, blah blah blah,” says Teko.
“Well what if they say, sorry no thanks?”
“We’ll move on to the next house.”
“What if they call the police?”
“They won’t, Dan,” says Yolanda. “The People know we’re doing it for their sake.”
“Um,” says Dan, “am I the People?”
Hacksaw 2
Yolanda reaches for the door at Klein Bros. Ace Hardware and is surprised when it opens automatically. Inside the place is bright and air-conditioned and playing “I Shot the Sheriff” from speakers stuck in the dropped ceiling so that the song follows her around. A teenage girl is mopping beyond a barrier of yellow WET FLOOR signs and a young man wearing a red blazer and carrying a clipboard emerges from a tiny office like a tollbooth set in the corner.
He asks the girl: “Can I see myself in it?”
“It’s good and shiny.”
“Can I eat off it?”
“It’s pretty clean.”
Trance Page 3
